stake. Even before the Joneses' tragedy, he wasn't willing to risk the lives of his belayers on difficult routes. Ironically, he was accused of inhumanity by Tita Piaz during the Piton Dispute (in spite of the fact that they were friends). However, his soloing eventually caught up with him. On 3 October 1913, in an attempt to make the first ascent of the North Ridge of the Mandlkogel free solo, Preuss fell more than 300m to his death. His body was found a week and a half later, buried under a foot and a half of new-fallen snow. While the actual cause of the fall will never be known, an open pocketknife and a rucksack with a length of sling material, as well as some cairns found ten years later, suggest that Preuss may have stopped for a rest high on the upper ridge and lost his balance as he tried to catch the pocketknife after it slipped from his grasp. Of course, other scenarios would also be consistent with these facts. In commemoration In the early 1920s, the German and Austrian Alpine Club became a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. In fact, a predominantly Jewish chapter of the club was expelled in 1924, and at least one of Preuss's climbing partners became a committed Nazi. Thus, for a time, Preuss's name and reputation were actively erased from memory. It was only in the 1970s that his legacy was finally rediscovered. Piaz, Preuss's friend and one time opponent in the Piton Dispute, erected a memorial in his honor twenty years after his death in the Italian Dolomites, which was a risky endeavor considering the rising tide of anti-Semitism and Fascism in the early 1930s (albeit Piaz was an anarchist who had been thrown into jail several times for his opposition to government in any form). The Kleinste Zinne now bears the name Torre Preuss (also known as the Cima Piccolissima), home of the Preuss Crack. A chimney on the South East Face of the Grohmannspitze, the Preusskamin, also features his name. In addition, there is a street dedicated to him in Munich. In a 2010 interview on Deutsche Welle, famed mountaineer Reinhold Messner named him as one of his heroes. Coda Next to a list of Preuss's major ascents, the closing words of Geoffrey Winthrop Young's 1913 obituary, may provide the best coda to Preuss's life: Selected notable ascents Preuss's hardest